I must go to bed. Padma is waiting; and I need a little warmth.
Hit-the-Spittoon
PLEASE BELIEVE that I am falling apart.
I am not speaking metaphorically; nor is this the opening gambit of some melodramatic, riddling, grubby appeal for pity. I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug—that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of acceleration. I ask you only to accept (as I have accepted) that I shall eventually crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust. This is why I have resolved to confide in paper, before I forget. (We are a nation of forgetters.)
There are moments of terror, but they go away. Panic like a bubbling sea-beast comes up for air, boils on the surface, but eventually returns to the deep. It is important for me to remain calm. I chew betel-nut and expectorate in the direction of a cheap brassy bowl, playing the ancient game of hit-the-spittoon: Nadir Khan’s game, which he learned from the old men in Agra … and these days you can buy “rocket paans” in which, as well as the gum-reddening paste of the betel, the comfort of cocaine lies folded in a leaf. But that would be cheating.
… Rising from my pages comes the unmistakable whiff of chutney. So let me obfuscate no further: I, Saleem Sinai, possessor of the most delicately-gifted olfactory organ in history, have dedicated my latter days to the large-scale preparation of condiments. But now, “A cook?” you gasp in horror, “A khansama merely? How is it possible?” And, I grant, such mastery of the multiple gifts of cookery and language is rare indeed; yet I possess it. You are amazed; but then I am not, you see, one of your 200-rupees-a-month cookery johnnies, but my own master, working beneath the saffron and green winking of my personal neon goddess. And my chutneys and kasaundies are, after all, connected to my nocturnal scribblings—by day amongst the pickle-vats, by night within these sheets, I spend my time at the great work of preserving. Memory, as well as fruit, is being saved from the corruption of the clocks.
But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the universe of what-happened-next: “At this rate,” Padma complains, “you’ll be two hundred years old before you manage to tell about your birth.” She is affecting nonchalance, jutting a careless hip in my general direction, but doesn’t fool me. I know now that she is, despite all her protestations, hooked. No doubt about it: my story has her by the throat, so that all at once she’s stopped nagging me to go home, to take more baths, to change my vinegar-stained clothes, to abandon even for a moment this darkling pickle-factory where the smells of spices are forever frothing in the air … now my dung goddess simply makes up a cot in the corner of this office and prepares my food on two blackened gas-rings, only interrupting my Anglepoise-lit writing to expostulate, “You better get a move on or you’ll die before you get yourself born.” Fighting down the proper pride of the successful storyteller, I attempt to educate her. “Things—even people—have a way of leaking into each other,” I explain, “like flavors when you cook. Ilse Lubin’s suicide, for example, leaked into old Aadam and sat there in a puddle until he saw God. Likewise,” I intone earnestly, “the past has dripped into me … so we can’t ignore it …” Her shrug, which does pleasantly wavy things to her chest, cuts me off. “To me it’s a crazy way of telling your life-story,” she cries, “if you can’t even get to where your father met your mother.”
… And certainly Padma is leaking into me. As history pours out of my fissured body, my lotus is quietly dripping in, with her down-to-earthery, and her paradoxical superstition, her contradictory love of the fabulous—so it’s appropriate that I’m about to tell the story of the death of Mian Abdullah. The doomed Hummingbird: a legend of our times.
… And Padma is a generous woman, because she stays by me in these last days, although I can’t do much for her. That’s right—and once again, it’s a fitting thing to mention before I launch into the tale of Nadir Khan—I am unmanned. Despite Padma’s many and varied gifts and ministrations, I can’t leak into her, not even when she puts her left foot on my right, winds her right leg around my waist, inclines her head up toward mine and makes cooing noises; not even when she whispers in my ear, “So now that the writery is done, let’s see if we can make your other pencil work!”; despite everything she tries, I cannot hit her spittoon.
Enough confessions. Bowing to the ineluctable Padma-pressures of what-happened-nextism, and remembering the finite quantity of time at my disposal, I leap forwards from Mercurochrome and land in 1942. (I’m keen to get my parents together, too.)
It seems that in the late summer of that year my grandfather, Doctor Aadam Aziz, contracted a highly dangerous form of optimism. Bicycling around Agra, he whistled piercingly, badly, but very happily. He was by no means alone, because, despite strenuous efforts by the authorities to stamp it out, this virulent disease had been breaking out all over India that year, and drastic steps were to be taken before it was brought under control. The old men at the paan-shop at the top of Cornwallis Road chewed betel and suspected a trick. “I have lived twice as long as I should have,” the oldest one said, his voice crackling like an old radio because decades were rubbing up against each other around his vocal chords, “and I’ve never seen so many people so cheerful in such a bad time. It is the Devil’s work.” It was, indeed, a resilient virus—the weather alone should have discouraged such germs from breeding, since it had become clear that the rains had failed. The earth was cracking. Dust ate the edges of roads, and on some days huge gaping fissures appeared in the midst of macadamed intersections. The betel-chewers at the paan-shop had begun to talk about omens; calming themselves with their game of hit-the-spittoon, they speculated upon the numberless nameless Godknowswhats that might now issue from the Assuring earth. Apparently a Sikh from the bicycle-repair shop had had his turban pushed off his head in the heat of one afternoon, when his hair, without any reason, had suddenly stood on end. And, more prosaically, the water shortage had reached the point where milkmen could no longer find clean water with which to adulterate the milk … Far away, there was a World War in progress once again. In Agra, the heat mounted. But still my grandfather whistled. The old men at the paan-shop found his whistling in rather poor taste, given the circumstances.
(And I, like them, expectorate and rise above fissures.)
Astride his bicycle, leather attaché attached to carrier, my grandfather whistled. Despite irritations of the nose, his lips pursed. Despite a bruise on his chest which had refused to fade for twenty-three years, his good humor was unimpaired. Air passed his lips and was transmuted into sound. He whistled an old German tune: Tannenbaum.
The optimism epidemic had been caused by one single human being, whose name, Mian Abdullah, was only used by newspapermen. To everyone else, he was the Hummingbird, a creature which would be impossible if it did not exist. “Magician turned conjurer,” the newspapermen wrote, “Mian Abdullah rose from the famous magicians’ ghetto in Delhi to become the hope of India’s hundred million Muslims.” The Hummingbird was the founder, chairman, unifier and moving spirit of the Free Islam Convocation; and in 1942, marquees and rostrums were being erected on the Agra maidan, where the Convocation’s second annual assembly was about to take place. My grandfather, fifty-two-years-old, his hair turned white by the years and other afflictions, had begun whistling as he passed the maidan. Now he leaned round corners on his bicycle, taking them at a jaunty angle, threading his way between cowpats and children … and, in another time and place, told his friend the Rani of Cooch Naheen: “I started off as a Kashmiri and not much of a Muslim. Then I got a bruise on the chest that turned me into an Indian. I’m still not much of a Muslim, but I’m all for Abdullah. He’s fighting my fight.” His eyes were still the blue of Kashmi
ri sky … he arrived home, and although his eyes retained a glimmer of contentment, the whistling stopped; because waiting for him in the courtyard filled with malevolent geese were the disapproving features of my grandmama, Naseem Aziz, whom he had made the mistake of loving in fragments, and who was now unified and transmuted into the formidable figure she would always remain, and who was always known by the curious title of Reverend Mother.
She had become a prematurely old, wide woman, with two enormous moles like witch’s nipples on her face; and she lived within an invisible fortress of her own making, an ironclad citadel of traditions and certainties. Earlier that year Aadam Aziz had commissioned life-size blow-up photographs of his family to hang on the living-room wall; the three girls and two boys had posed dutifully enough, but Reverend Mother had rebelled when her turn came. Eventually, the photographer had tried to catch her unawares, but she seized his camera and broke it over his skull. Fortunately, he lived; but there are no photographs of my grandmother anywhere on the earth. She was not one to be trapped in anyone’s little black box. It was enough for her that she must live in unveiled, barefaced shamelessness—there was no question of allowing the fact to be recorded.
It was perhaps the obligation of facial nudity, coupled with Aziz’s constant requests for her to move beneath him, that had driven her to the barricades; and the domestic rules she established were a system of self-defense so impregnable that Aziz, after many fruitless attempts, had more or less given up trying to storm her many ravelins and bastions, leaving her, like a large smug spider, to rule her chosen domain. (Perhaps, too, it wasn’t a system of self-defense at all, but a means of defense against her self.)
Among the things to which she denied entry were all political matters. When Doctor Aziz wished to talk about such things, he visited his friend the Rani, and Reverend Mother sulked; but not very hard, because she knew his visits represented a victory for her.
The twin hearts of her kingdom were her kitchen and her pantry. I never entered the former, but remembered staring through the pantry’s locked screen-doors at the enigmatic world within, a world of hanging wire baskets covered with linen cloths to keep out the flies, of tins which I knew to be full of gur and other sweets, of locked chests with neat square labels, of nuts and turnips and sacks of grain, of goose-eggs and wooden brooms. Pantry and kitchen were her inalienable territory; and she defended them ferociously. When she was carrying her last child, my aunt Emerald, her husband offered to relieve her of the chore of supervising the cook. She did not reply; but the next day, when Aziz approached the kitchen, she emerged from it with a metal pot in her hands and barred the doorway. She was fat and also pregnant, so there was not much room left in the doorway. Aadam Aziz frowned. “What is this, wife?” To which my grandmother answered, “This, whatsitsname, is a very heavy pot; and if just once I catch you in here, whatsitsname, I’ll push your head into it, add some dahi, and make, whatsitsname, a korma.” I don’t know how my grandmother came to adopt the term whatsitsname as her leitmotif, but as the years passed it invaded her sentences more and more often. I like to think of it as an unconscious cry for help … as a seriously-meant question. Reverend Mother was giving us a hint that, for all her presence and bulk, she was adrift in the universe. She didn’t know, you see, what it was called.
… And at the dinner-table, imperiously, she continued to rule. No food was set upon the table, no plates were laid. Curry and crockery were marshalled upon a low side-table by her right hand, and Aziz and the children ate what she dished out. It is a sign of the power of this custom that, even when her husband was afflicted by constipation, she never once permitted him to choose his food, and listened to no requests or words of advice. A fortress may not move. Not even when its dependants’ movements become irregular.
During the long concealment of Nadir Khan, during the visits to the house on Cornwallis Road of young Zulfikar who fell in love with Emerald and of the prosperous reccine-and-leathercloth merchant named Ahmed Sinai who hurt my aunt Alia so badly that she bore a grudge for twenty-five years before discharging it cruelly upon my mother, Reverend Mother’s iron grip upon her household never faltered; and even before Nadir’s arrival precipitated the great silence, Aadam Aziz had tried to break this grip, and been obliged to go to war with his wife. (All this helps to show how remarkable his affliction by optimism actually was.)
… In 1932, ten years earlier, he had taken control of his children’s education. Reverend Mother was dismayed; but it was a father’s traditional role, so she could not object. Alia was eleven; the second daughter, Mumtaz, was almost nine. The two boys, Hanif and Mustapha, were eight and six, and young Emerald was not yet five. Reverend Mother took to confiding her fears to the family cook, Daoud. “He fills their heads with I don’t know what foreign languages, whatsitsname, and other rubbish also, no doubt.” Daoud stirred pots and Reverend Mother cried, “Do you wonder, whatsitsname, that the little one calls herself Emerald? In English, whatsitsname? That man will ruin my children for me. Put less cumin in that, whatsitsname, you should pay more attention to your cooking and less to minding other people’s business.”
She made only one educational stipulation: religious instruction. Unlike Aziz, who was racked by ambiguity, she had remained devout. “You have your Hummingbird,” she told him, “but I, whatsitsname, have the Call of God. A better noise, whatsitsname, than that man’s hum.” It was one of her rare political comments … and then the day arrived when Aziz threw out the religious tutor. Thumb and forefinger closed around the maulvi’s ear. Naseem Aziz saw her husband leading the stragglebearded wretch to the door in the garden wall; gasped; then cried out as her husband’s foot was applied to the divine’s fleshy parts. Unleashing thunderbolts, Reverend Mother sailed into battle.
“Man without dignity!” she cursed her husband, and, “Man without, whatsitsname, shame!” Children watched from the safety of the back verandah. And Aziz, “Do you know what that man was teaching your children?,” And Reverend Mother hurling question against question, “What will you not do to bring disaster, whatsitsname, on our heads?”—But now Aziz, “You think it was Nastaliq script? Eh?”—to which his wife, warming up: “Would you eat pig? Whatsitsname? Would you spit on the Quran?” And, voice rising, the doctor ripostes, “Or was it some verses of ‘The Cow’? You think that?” … Paying no attention, Reverend Mother arrives at her climax: “Would you marry your daughters to Germans!?” And pauses, fighting for breath, letting my grandfather reveal, “He was teaching them to hate, wife. He tells them to hate Hindus and Buddhists and Jains and Sikhs and who knows what other vegetarians. Will you have hateful children, woman?”
“Will you have godless ones?” Reverend Mother envisages the legions of the Archangel Gabriel descending at night to carry her heathen brood to Hell. She has vivid pictures of Hell. It is as hot as Rajputana in June and everyone is made to learn seven foreign languages … “I take this oath, whatsitsname,” my grandmother said, “I swear no food will come from my kitchen to your lips! No, not one chapati, until you bring the maulvi sahib back and kiss his, whatsitsname, feet!”
The war of starvation which began that day very nearly became a duel to the death. True to her word, Reverend Mother did not hand her husband, at mealtimes, so much as an empty plate. Doctor Aziz took immediate reprisals, by refusing to feed himself when he was out. Day by day the five children watched their father disappearing, while their mother grimly guarded the dishes of food. “Will you be able to vanish completely?” Emerald asked with interest, adding solicitously, “Don’t do it unless you know how to come back again.” Aziz’s face acquired craters; even his nose appeared to be getting thinner. His body had become a battlefield and each day a piece of it was blasted away. He told Alia, his eldest, the wise child: “In any war, the field of battle suffers worse devastation than either army. This is natural.” He began to take rickshaws when he did his rounds. Hamdard the rickshaw-wallah began to worry about him.
The Rani of Cooch Naheen sen
t emissaries to plead with Reverend Mother. “India isn’t full enough of starving people?” the emissaries asked Naseem, and she unleashed a basilisk glare which was already becoming a legend. Hands clasped in her lap, a muslin dupatta wound miser-tight around her head, she pierced her visitors with lid-less eyes and stared them down. Their voices turned to stone; their hearts froze; and alone in a room with strange men, my grandmother sat in triumph, surrounded by downcast eyes. “Full enough, whatsitsname?” she crowed. “Well, perhaps. But also, perhaps not.”
But the truth was that Naseem Aziz was very anxious; because while Aziz’s death by starvation would be a clear demonstration of the superiority of her idea of the world over his, she was unwilling to be widowed for a mere principle; yet she could see no way out of the situation which did not involve her in backing down and losing face, and having learned to bare her face, my grandmother was most reluctant to lose any of it.
“Fall ill, why don’t you?”—Alia, the wise child, found the solution. Reverend Mother beat a tactical retreat, announced a pain, a killing pain absolutely, whatsitsname, and took to her bed. In her absence Alia extended the olive branch to her father, in the shape of a bowl of chicken soup. Two days later, Reverend Mother rose (having refused to be examined by her husband for the first time in her life), reassumed her powers, and with a shrug of acquiescence in her daughter’s decision, passed Aziz his food as though it were a mere trifle of a business.
That was ten years earlier; but still, in 1942, the old men at the paan-shop are stirred by the sight of the whistling doctor into giggling memories of the time when his wife had nearly made him do a disappearing trick, even though he didn’t know how to come back. Late into the evening they nudge each other with, “Do you remember when—” and “Dried up like a skeleton on a washing-line! He couldn’t even ride his—” and “—I tell you, baba, that woman could do terrible things. I heard she could even dream her daughters’ dreams, just to know what they were getting up to!” But as evening settles in the nudges die away, because it is time for the contest. Rhythmically, in silence, their jaws move; then all of a sudden there is a pursing of lips, but what emerges is not air-made-sound. No whistle, but instead a long red jet of betel-juice passes decrepit lips, and moves in unerring accuracy towards an old brass spittoon. There is much slapping of thighs and self-admiring utterance of “Wah, wah, sir!” and, “Absolutely master shot!” … Around the oldsters, the town fades into desultory evening pastimes. Children play hoop and kabaddi and draw beards on posters of Mian Abdullah. And now the old men place the spittoon in the street, further and further from their squatting-place, and aim longer and longer jets at it. Still the fluid flies true. “Oh too good, yara!” The street urchins make a game of dodging in and out between the red streams, superimposing this game of chicken upon the serious art of hit-the-spittoon … But here is an army staff car, scattering urchins as it comes … here, Brigadier Dodson, the town’s military commander, stifling with heat … and here, his A.D.C., Major Zulfikar, passing him a towel. Dodson mops his face; urchins scatter; the car knocks over the spittoon. A dark red fluid with clots in it like blood congeals like a red hand in the dust of the street and points accusingly at the retreating power of the Raj.